A STRANGE ADVENTURE
It really seemed awfully funny.
Nan went about with sealed lips save when she had to ask a question of a
neighbor in study hour or in class. Even in Room Seven, Corridor Four,
there was silence. Bess was at first amused, then disgusted, then
indignant.
"Why! whoever heard the like?" she cried. "Not to speak? Goodness! Why,
I never had so many things to say to you in my life before, and you sit
as dumb as one of those Japanese monkeys," and she pointed to the tiny
"Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil" group on Nan's bookshelf.
At first Nan only smiled at her chum's impatience. But soon she found it
necessary to steal off by herself during recreation time. The temptation
to speak was too great.
Nor did Bess try to make it easier for Nan to keep strictly to the line
of punishment that had been inflicted upon her by Dr. Beulah Prescott.
Bess began to take a wicked delight in catching her off her guard and
getting a word past Nan's lips before she thought.
"Oh bah!" cried the careless Bess. "What does it matter? We're in our
own room. Dr. Beulah knows very well you won't stick to the very letter
of her command."
Nan felt differently about it. The principal had trusted her to keep her
lips sealed during recreation hours; and she tried as much as possible
to keep by herself. "Solitary recreation hours for a week." That was Dr.
Prescott's command and Nan did her best to keep away from her
fellow-pupils. One afternoon, between her last recitation for the day
and suppertime, she went down to Mrs. Cupp with her arms full of summer
clothing, for permission to put the frocks away in her trunk.
"Here's your key and the key to the trunk-room. I trust the latter to
you, Nancy, because I see you are a girl of honor," Mrs. Cupp said,
rather kindly for her. "I see you are trying to obey the doctor's
instructions regarding your recreation time. You may stay down there
till the supper bell rings, if you like. But remember, if you wish to
bring anything up with you from your trunk, you must show it to me."
"Yes Mrs. Cupp," replied Nan, soberly.
This was not the first time she had asked permission to go to her trunk.
And she had always chosen a time when no other girls were around, and
she could be alone in the trunk-room. She went down stairs rather
thoughtfully now. Mrs. Cupp believed she was a girl of honor. Nan was
wondering if, after all, she came up to the requirements for such a
person?
"I am not being entirely truthful right now," she thought. "I don't need
to go down cellar with these things. I have plenty of room for them in
my clothes closet. I am going to my trunk for an entirely different
reason.
"I wonder," pursued Nan Sherwood, reflectively, "if all girls are like
that? Are we naturally untruthful about little things? Do I know a
perfectly frank girl in all this school? Goodness! nobody but poor
Amelia Boggs, and she is half-cracked, the other girls say.
"That's why I like Walter," declared Nan, to herself. "I guess that is
why I like Cousin Tom--and even Rafe. It's sometimes ugly to speak the
brutal truth, I know. But it is never dishonorable. Now am I
deliberately acting deceitfully because I did not tell Mrs. Cupp _all_
my reason for coming down here?"
Such abstract questions as this often troubled Nan Sherwood. She never
discussed them with her chum, or with anybody else, now. But she often
wished she could talk them over with her mother, as she used to do.
"Momsey" always saw everything so clearly, and always knew just the
right and wrong of things.
"And it's so hard sometimes," Nan murmured, "to tell what is right and
what is wrong!"
She snapped on the electric light nearest to her trunk. The receptacles
were in rows, each with a card on which the owner's name was clearly
written. Nan's was in a corner at the end of the main building nearest
the unfinished part. She had come down a passage from the stairway to
get to the trunk-room. This part of the cellar was a long way from the
kitchen and scullery.
Some of the girls were afraid to come to the trunk-room alone, although
their imagination had not yet peopled this part of the Hall with ghosts.
Nan thought of nothing, when she had raised the lid of her trunk, but
one thing. She carefully put aside the empty trays and the layers of
clothing hiding the long box at the bottom of the trunk.
It was locked with a little brass padlock. Tom Sherwood had made the box
very neatly and nobody could possibly open the receptacle without the
key, unless the box were broken. Nan wore the tiny key in a little
leather bag, on a chain of fine gold links which had been her mother's
when she was a little girl in Memphis.
Nan quickly unlocked the box and raised the cover. A rush of sweet
smelling herb-odors burst forth. It was the combined odor of the
tamarack swamp of upper Michigan (or so it seemed), where Nan had spent
the past summer. She lifted aside the covering of tissue paper, and
revealed a great, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed, beautiful doll!
It was as large as a real baby, and it was dressed elegantly. Nan's
mother, with her own frail hands, had made all the garments "Beautiful
Beulah" wore.
"Beulah, _dear_!" murmured Nan, hugging the doll up tight to her bosom
and rocking herself to and fro as she sat upon the floor. "It's just
like going home again, to see you. Wouldn't you like to see our dear
little room in the 'dwelling in amity'? If only we could fly back there,
really! Only for just an hour! And have Momsey and Papa Sherwood at
home, too, and all be together again!"
Nan choked up at this and the tears began to flow. But she crowded them
back in a moment. "Oh! this will never do--this will never do," she
cried, under her breath. "I'll only make you feel bad, too, my dear,
darling Beautiful Beulah. And, goodness me!" added Nan Sherwood,
suddenly becoming practical, "what would Dr. Beulah think if she heard
me? She would perhaps think I had named you after her. I'm not sure that
a principal of a great school like this would want to be godmother to a
doll.
"I don't care! I guess that's why I love her so much--because she bears
the same name as you, my dear. And you'd love her, too, if you could
know her. Oh, dear! I wonder if I did wrong in hiding you down here in
the bottom of my trunk? Mrs. Cupp certainly wouldn't have taken you away
from me. The girls might have made fun, and Bess, I s'pose, would have
been difficult. But I'd have felt better to have you up stairs in Number
Seven, Corridor Four----"
A step in the passage outside the open trunk-room door! Nan rose up in a
panic, clutching Beulah to her breast. Somebody was coming.
There was not time to put the doll back into her nest and successfully
hide her. The wall at the end of the cellar was of heavy planking. A
pile of empty dry-goods cases stood at hand, a narrow alley having been
left between the tiers of boxes and the plank wall.
Nan darted behind this screen of boxes, the doll in her arms. She
slipped on something in the dark passage and was flung with considerable
force against the plank partition. To her amazement and alarm, a narrow
section of the partition moved out, dropping downward and outward from
the top, as though it were hinged at the bottom.
This narrow door was weighted, so it could not fall abruptly. Nan was
flung sprawling upon it, and lay there with her doll, as the shutter
dropped quietly to a horizontal position.
She knew she lay over some deep cistern, or the like, and that the plank
door bridged it. It was pitch-dark behind the partition and a sour, damp
smell, like the odor of an old brewing cellar, rose to her nostrils. Nan
Sherwood, startled as she was, uttered no outcry.